On Wednesday, some AT&T cellphone users were unable to dial 911, but it was only for a few hours. It didn’t take long for city and county law enforcement along with emergency response teams to warm people. The teams headed to social media warning people over the span of five hours about the possibility of being unable to dial for emergencies.
Officials in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Indiana, Colorado, and even Washington D.C. released warnings to AT&T customers that they might not be able to contact 911 dispatchers in the case of emergency.
Even though the problem was resolved, AT&T has yet to disclose what really went to wrong to cause this to happen in the first place. There’s also no telling just how many people were affected.
Customers were alerted with a warning that started around 5:50 p.m. The Monongalia County Homeland Security Emergency Management Agency located in West Virginia started warning people via Facebook around this time. The warnings to AT&T customers continued well into the afternoon until around 10:25 p.m. It was at that same time that AT&T stated they had fixed a problem.
In Indiana, the Hendricks County Communications Center which is a consolidated dispatch center for fire, police, and emergency medical services stated that the calls coming in from AT&T customers just wouldn’t connect.
In order to accommodate the customers that were unable to contact 911 for emergency response, Hendricks made a Facebook post saying, “We have conducted test calls locally and it will just ring.” Hendricks then made sure to provide a number for those to call in case they needed a dispatch officer.
AT&T has reported to me that 911 service is now restored. The @FCC will investigate the root cause of the outage and its impact.
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) March 9, 2017
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, made a Twitter statement saying that they had heard reports of the issue and were further investigating the incident.
AT&T released a statement later that same night around 10:30 p.m. saying that “service has been restored for wireless customers affected by an issue connecting to 911. We apologize to those affected.”
Here are steps I've taken in response to yesterday's 911 outage. FCC staff & I will be investigating cause/impact. https://t.co/vHhGB86O88 pic.twitter.com/MPgZooqtBS
— Ajit Pai (@AjitPai) March 9, 2017
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